It has been a fun and rewarding experience working with and getting to know Joseph through the SUL internship program. Joseph's 'home base' was Social Science Data and Software (SSDS) and staff members welcomed his help with a number of projects. Joseph blended in quickly and we soon learned that Joseph is remarkably versatile and always willing to learn new skills. Before long, he began supporting both SSDS and SUL IT services in Green!

Seven lucky students from Eastside College Preparatory School in East Palo Alto have earned a gig at the Stanford Libraries for a summer internship. The interns have been placed in different libraries from Green to Meyer, to Music and Biology.

I am Veronica Rubalcava and I am the co-coordinator for the internship program. When I heard about the internship program, I was pleased to know that an opportunity for first-generation college students was being offered.

Over the last 6 weeks, I've been extremely lucky to work with Mia Kirkendoll. As her intern supervisor, I've been proud to watch Mia come into her own as a mature and professional young lady. Mia is part of the Stanford Libraries internship program for local First Generation college students.

The University Archives is pleased to announe that it has added several items to the Stanford Digital Repository (SDR) recently. Included amongst the treasures are a variety of University maps and motion pictures, as well as faculty papers. Highlights include:

Stanford University Libraries has just acquired access to a few new databases for scholars working on French and Italian topics!

Olschki Complete online: All monographs and conference proceedings published between 2000-2011 by the prestigious Italian publishing house Leo S. Olschki are now available online through the Torrossa/Editoria Italiana Online database, along with Italian scholarly publications from many other important publishers. Most of the Olschki titles are on Italian literature and history, but there are also works in other disciplines such as classics, art and art history, philosophy, and musicology. As with other titles in Torrossa, you may download the PDFs in Adobe Acrobat. Mac users need to open Acrobat before opening the PDF - it does not work in Preview.

Corpus Montaigne: "Contains all the different editions of the works of Montaigne from the 16th and 17th centuries, published from the manuscripts and the printed originals, including "all the works published in Montaigne's lifetime and after his death by his daughter-in-law, Marie de Gournay, all the editions published from the 16th to the 20th century, their annotation and critical apparatus." Also includes PDF reproductions of selected works."

Grand corpus des grammaires françaises, des remarques et des traités sur la langue (XIVe-XVIIe s.) : "The Grand Corpus des grammaires françaises, des remarques et des traités sur la langue XVe-XVIIe siècles (Great Corpus of French language Grammars, Commentaries and Treatises on language (15th-17th centuries)) groups together in one database the Corpus of French Renaissance grammars, the Corpus of French 17th century grammars and the Corpus of remarks on the French language (17th Century). This is close to representing all the French grammars of the 15th and 17th centuries. Each grammar is presented both in a digitalised format identical to the original version and also as a fac-simile. The Great Corpus is unique in that it allows research ranging from basic reference to in-depth academic research, according to the requirements of researchers and students."

On May 28, 2013 a peaceful sit-in at Gezi Park in Taksim, Istanbul was disrupted by police and resulted in a number of deaths and many injuries. The sit-in was a response to an announcement made by the government for plans to demolish the small park and replace it with a shopping mall. After the violent police reaction, many other protests about governmental personal liberty infringements in Turkey formed and grew into movements.

[Update #1: I added links to the OnlineBooks site at UPenn for historic materials from the "United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities" and "United States. National Security Agency -- History." OnlineBooks site pulls together digital material from HathiTrust and Internet Archive with items in your library's catalog. Very nice indeed! Thanks John Mark Ockerbloom at UPenn for the suggestion!]

There has been an ongoing series of bombshell reports this past week about the recently leaked news that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been collecting wholesale Americans' phone communications, email- and internet traffic in several top-secret programs -- most notably the program called PRISM, which seems to be an outgrowth of the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program defunded by Congress in 2003 after a huge public outcry. The best coverage so far has been by the Guardian's Glenn Greenwald and the Washington Post. But there's also been a document dump by the Web group Anonymous (http://pastebin.com/MPpT7xaf) as well as analysis and reports by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Democracy Now.

We thought it'd be helpful to point to some library and information resources in an effort to help the Stanford community and the public wrap their heads around the complex issues surrounding the NSA revelations.

SUL Library Systems will upgrade Symphony to the latest SirsiDynix release, Symphony 3.4.1 SP3, during the period June 21-22.

During the upgrade, WorkFlows, Socrates and My Account functionality will be unavailable. SearchWorks will still be available throughout the upgrade, however request links and availability status will not be functioning.

The upgrade will start on Friday, June 21 at 9pm, and should be complete by 9am Saturday, June 22 (before any libraries open.) All staff who use WorkFlows should check their e-mail before logging on to the system after this time. An announcement of upgrade completion will be sent, including instructions for updating the WorkFlows client.